With the advent of the new glass cockpits, a lot of thought went into the kind of training that would be necessary to adequately prepare a pilot to safely utilize these more sophisticated systems. The FAA worked with the general aviation industry to put together a set of standards for glass cockpit training. The original idea was that any instructor who wanted to train others on a glass cockpit aircraft would have to go through the certified factory school.
Time has passed and along with the growing number of airplanes equipped with glass cockpits, there is a growing controversy about who should be allowed to train in a glass cockpit aircraft, now referred to as a Technically Advanced Aircraft (TAA). On one side are those who feel strongly that only factory or insurance company authorized instructors should be able to instruct in a TAA. On the other side are people like CFI David Dewhirst, who wrote in the first quarter 2007 AOPA Air Safety Foundation Instructor Report that, “any seasoned instructor is perfectly capable of taking an airplane flight manual … and creating a training program.”
